Arch 4980.02

Beyond Biocultural Diversity: Re-coupling Culture and Nature 2

Faculty: Julia Watson

Introduction

In the current period of economic and biospheric crises known as the sixth great extinction, conservation has emerged as a primary defense in combating climate change and forecasted environmental catastrophes. The emergent sub-field of biocultural diversity conservation, explores the coexistence of sustainability, respondent to cultural and biological diversity. In support of the changing global conservation agenda is the design of indigenous landscape systems. Through the re-coupling of culture and nature, a fractured legacy of our industrial past, new connections will be forged that associate new design agendas and ally traditional ecological knowledge with scientific exploration. Technological innovation will be allowed to systematically restructure the trajectory of development in the landscape through the synthetic design of natural and built ecologies.

Intrusions in the landscape have emerged from the effects of globalization, urbanization, industrialization and agriculturalization and compounded by the reciprocal effects of climate change. These drivers of change continually infiltrate new territories within the biosphere, migrating from urban agglomerations to remote and fragile landscapes. In these landscapes, the dual threat of overexploitation and mismanagement requires a new ethic of conservation and environmental stewardship. By ignoring these patterns we risk approaching environmental tipping points that could catastrophically reduce the capacity of ecosystems to provide essential services that support human wellbeing. These issues are increasingly sited in the remote lands of developing countries facing expanding patterns of consumption that compromise the existence of their natural biological reserves.

The next generation of designers will be challenged to re-couple culture and nature, determining a path beyond forecasted environmental tipping points inherited from the last century of high-speed change, biodiversity loss, and unregulated expansion. Design explorations within the thesis section will pursue an agenda beyond the paradigm of Ecological Urbanism, the current conversation between the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture and the ecological sciences. Emergent theories of biocultural diversity, a field of conservation presently making its impact within the ecological sciences, will be extended and explored through design. Design will be challenged to determine how interventions as ecological prosthetic, can be embedded and elicit a new confluence within an ecosystem.

Conflicting environmental and economic agendas have opened up a window of opportunity to re-establish the biospheric agenda as the crucial foundation upon which future development will most successfully proceed. On this point, the thesis will be similarly founded on the goal of interrogating our global drivers of change, in an effort to redirect development in support of our most valuable resource, our biocultural diversity.

Challenging the Role of the Designer

The landscape architect’s role in this mission is to re-couple culture and nature. Design strategies will consider the multiscalar and multivalent dimensions of drivers of change and envision alternative futures using scenario analysis modeling. While exploring new modes of design, we will re-envision the ‘architect’, as a multidisciplinary agent for critical change. The design agent will examine and map existing systems and their autonomous conditions with a view to creating synergies. You will be challenged to determine how design intervention as ecological prosthetic can be embedded at a moment of confluence. Mitigation and adaptation, deployed through design intervention, will reposition local and global tipping points.

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